An explosion in a quarry unearths a calcified hand, which is
inadvertently discovered by Sarah. The hand contains the consciousness
of a silicon-based alien called Eldrad, who seizes control of Sarah's
mind and compels her to break into a nuclear reactor, where he is able
to regenerate his entire body. Eldrad then convinces the Doctor to
return him to his homeworld of Kastria, from which he claims to have
been wrongfully exiled. But there is far more to Eldrad's past than he
is letting on...

Production

In February 1975, the longtime Doctor Who scriptwriting duo of
Bob Baker and Dave Martin watched as their most recent contribution,
The Sontaran Experiment, was transmitted as
part of Season Twelve. By this point, they were already working on new
ideas for the programme, and around the end of May they submitted to the
production office an outline for a six-part story called “Hand Of
Fear” (which may have also gone by the titles “The Hand Of
Time” and “The Hand Of Death”). The “Bristol
Boys” thought that this new adventure might be suitable as the
final serial of Doctor Who's thirteenth season.

Several disparate concepts underpinned “Hand Of Fear”,
amongst them the presence of a completely ruthless, bloodless villain,
the phenomenon of people who wanted to escape modern society and get
back to nature, and the inclusion of murderous hands that could move on
their own. The latter evolved from script editor Robert Holmes'
suggestion that Baker and Martin consider including elements of Maurice
Renard's 1920 novel Les mains d'Orlac (which had mostly recently
been adapted for the screen in 1962 as The Hands Of Orlac,
starring Christopher Lee). This concerned an amputee who is cursed with
new hands which had originally belonged to a murderer, and now induced
him to kill as well. Holmes also wanted the Bristol Boys to think in
terms of “crawling hands” films such as The Beast With
Five Fingers (1946).

The Hand Of Fear was viewed as
an opportunity to send Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart out in a blaze of
glory

In addition, Holmes and producer Philip Hinchcliffe were in the process
of winding down the involvement of UNIT in Doctor Who, moving
away from the prevalence the organisation had maintained throughout Jon
Pertwee's tenure as the Doctor. “Hand Of Fear” was therefore
viewed as an opportunity to send Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart out in a
blaze of glory (something which had also been considered for the
original version of Pyramids Of Mars). For
a suitable villain, Baker and Martin decided to seize upon the notion of
a thoroughly “bloodless” individual and literally send the
Doctor and the Brigadier up against a creature made completely out of
stone.

“Hand Of Fear” was set in the 1990s, at a time when
technology and the military are forbidden. Sarah is sent to live in a
commune while the Doctor is despatched to a labour camp. There he meets
the aged Brigadier -- now part of EXIT, the Extraterrestrial Xenological
Intelligence Taskforce -- and discovers that an anthropologist named
Mountford has unearthed a mysterious fossilised hand. The hand takes
control of Mountford's mind and forces him to transport it to the Nuton
nuclear reactor (previously seen in Baker and Martin's Season Nine story
The Claws Of Axos), which is in the
process of being decommissioned. There, the radiation allows the hand to
regenerate into its original form: a creature called an Omegan made of
teryllium, which has travelled to Earth from inside a black hole.

It transpires that there are actually two Omegans at work on Earth,
representing different factions of their people. The “hawk”
Omegans wish to destroy humanity, while the “dove” Omegans
simply want to remove mankind as an interstellar threat. They have
accomplished this by slowly devolving men into ape-like Trogs, which
manifested itself early on as the backlash again science. Sarah is now
undergoing the same transformation. This is undone, however, when the
“hawk” Omegan (who crashlanded on Earth, necessitating
his reconstitution at Nuton) destroys his “dove”
counterpart. He then flees Earth in the other Omegan's spaceship, having
configured Nuton to explode and obliterate the planet. At the last
second, the Doctor manages to redirect the power of the blast to fuel an
experimental rocket called the Icarus. Brigadier Lethbridge
Stewart commandeers the Icarus and uses it to pursue the Omegan,
ultimately sacrificing himself by ramming the enemy vessel head-on,
preventing it from impacting with the Earth.

The writers introduced an untrustworthy Time Lord mechanic
named Drax, who was conceived as a possible recurring character

On June 19th, Baker and Martin met with Hinchcliffe and Holmes to
discuss their storyline proposal. At this point, it was decided to do
away with the near-future setting (and hence the evolution of UNIT into
EXIT), as well as the Brigadier's demise. Nonetheless, the production
team was pleased with “Hand Of Fear”, and it was formally
commissioned the next day. At this point, it was planned that
“Hand Of Fear” would indeed be Serial 4L, the final story of
Season Thirteen, and would be directed by Douglas Camfield.

Over the summer, the plot of Baker and Martin's adventure -- now given
the slightly amended title of The Hand Of Fear -- continued to
evolve. Lieutenant Hawker, who had been a central character in the
original draft, was largely replaced with former companion Harry
Sullivan. Along with the calcified hand, an Omegan spaceship (referred
to as “the Monolith”) was now discovered at the start of
episode one, and became central to the storyline, serving as the
location of the adventure's climax. The separate factions of Omegans
were excised. Baker and Martin also introduced a new supporting
character, in the form of a Time Lord named Drax. An untrustworthy
Gallifreyan mechanic who wants to steal the TARDIS, Drax was conceived
as a possible recurring character for Doctor Who.

As autumn loomed, Holmes continued to harbour concerns about The Hand
Of Fear, believing that it was too complex and convoluted. With less
than two months remaining before Serial 4L was due to enter production,
Robert Banks Stewart was commissioned on September 30th to write The Seeds Of Doom, which could replace The
Hand Of Fear as the season closer if circumstances demanded it.
Finally, on October 14th, Hinchcliffe decided to pull The Hand Of
Fear from the schedule; Baker and Martin agreed to continue working
on the story, with a view to readying it for the penultimate slot of
Season Fourteen instead.

After production concluded on The Seeds Of
Doom, Elisabeth Sladen informed Hinchcliffe that she wanted to
leave Doctor Who early in the next block of stories. Sarah Jane
was about to become the longest-serving companion, surpassing Jo Grant's
three seasons (although Jamie McCrimmon continued to hold the record as
the companion who had appeared in the most episodes), and Sladen thought
it was time for new challenges.

In Douglas Camfield's The Lost
Legion, Sarah would be killed at the climax of an alien war

Around the same time, Douglas Camfield approached the production team
about writing for the series. On January 22nd, Camfield was commissioned
to write “The Lost Legion”, a four-part story set in a
French Foreign Legion outpost which involved a campaign between the
alien Skarkel and Khoorians. It was agreed that, at the story's climax,
Sarah would be killed by the last of the aliens, making her the first
companion to die since Katarina and Sara Kingdom perished in Season
Three's The Daleks' Master Plan.

From an early stage, Holmes was dubious about “The Lost
Legion”, despite Hinchcliffe's enthusiasm for the project. Holmes
became more concerned when Camfield delivered his first script on
February 9th. In an ironic turnabout, Holmes decided that The Hand Of
Fear should now be prepared as a possible replacement for Camfield's
serial, and so he issued a revised, four-part breakdown to Baker and
Martin the same day. This shorter version removed UNIT and the
devolving-humans aspects of the plot altogether; also deleted was Drax,
although the Bristol Boys would revive the character for The Armageddon Factor in Season Sixteen. Baker
and Martin formally agreed to write the four-episode version of The
Hand Of Fear on March 3rd.

As Baker and Martin worked on the new scripts for The Hand Of
Fear, Camfield fell increasingly behind deadline on “The Lost
Legion”. By the end of March, The Hand Of Fear was now on
the schedule in its place. Baker and Martin left Sarah's departure for
Holmes to write, but there were no longer plans to kill off the
character. This met with Sladen's approval, as she had feared such a
turn of events would upset Doctor Who's younger audience
members.

In making the final transition to its completed form, The Hand Of
Fear continued to undergo changes. Holmes was concerned that the
name “Omegan” would cause confusion with Omega, the villain
of Baker and Martin's own Season Ten adventure The
Three Doctors, and so the aliens were correspondingly renamed
Kastrians. It was also decided that the nuclear complex should not be
the same as the one seen in The Claws Of
Axos, and consequently the name of the location was amended
slightly to “Nunton” (rather than “Nuton”).

Filming on June 14th and 15th was a rare instance of a
quarry actually appearing in Doctor Who as a
quarry

Now designated Serial 4N, The Hand Of Fear was directed by Lennie
Mayne, whose most recent work had been on The
Monster Of Peladon. Sadly, this would also be Mayne's final
contribution to Doctor Who. After completing one further
directorial assignment (an episode of Softly, Softly: Task
Force), Mayne drowned when he was swept overboard by a freak wave in
the English Channel. Even at this stage, Hinchcliffe was not entirely
happy with The Hand Of Fear, as he felt that the first two
episodes were lacking in incident and failed to give Sarah Jane enough
of a role to befit her final adventure. Unfortunately, by now Holmes was
completing his own scripts for the next story, The
Deadly Assassin, and could do no further work on The Hand Of
Fear.

Production on Serial 4L began with filming at the ARC Quarry in
Cromhall, Gloucestershire on June 14th and 15th. This was a rare
instance of a quarry actually appearing in Doctor Who as a
quarry, rather than posing as some form of alien landscape. June 16th
began with roadway material, recorded at Oldbury-on-Severn in
Gloucestershire, and continued at the nearby Oldbury Power Station.
Unusually, Baker and Martin had assisted in securing this location,
which was very near to where they lived. Cast and crew remained there on
the 17th, before travelling to Thornbury, Gloucestershire on June 18th
for Sarah's departure. The dog in this scene was handled by Mayne's
wife, Frances Pidgeon, whom he had also cast as Miss Jackson (a
character originally intended to be male).

Production then moved to BBC Television Centre Studio 8, beginning with
a three-day block from July 5th to 7th. This dealt with all the
Earth-based scenes, with each day devoted to one of the first three
episodes. Cast and crew were plagued on one of these days by a
persistent fly, which was noisy enough to interfere with the sound
recording. The interloper was finally dealt with when Sladen
inadvertently swallowed it while reciting her “Eldrad must
live!” mantra. The second studio session then took place on July
19th and 20th. Recording on the first day focussed on sequences in the
TARDIS, as well as material on Kastria from parts one and three. The
remaining Kastrian scenes from the final installment were then taped on
the 20th.

July 20th brought Elisabeth Sladen's regular involvement
in Doctor Who to a close

This day also brought Elisabeth Sladen's regular involvement in
Doctor Who to a close. She would continue to work in theatre,
television and film, including appearances in Take My Wife...,
Dempsey & Makepeace and Peak Practice. In 1985, she gave
birth to a daughter, Sadie, and curtailed her schedule considerably for
some years thereafter. Sladen also found Doctor Who a difficult
programme to stay away from. She took a starring role in the 1981
Christmas special K-9 And Company, which was originally intended
to pave the way for an ongoing spin-off series. She then appeared in two
Doctor Who anniversary episodes -- 1983's The Five Doctors and 1993's Dimensions In Time -- before rejoining her
original Doctor, Jon Pertwee, for the radio adventures The Paradise
Of Death (1993) and The Ghosts Of N-Space (1996).

In the twenty-first century, Sladen recorded two seasons of audio dramas
starring Sarah Jane for Big Finish Productions before finally accepting
an invitation from Doctor Who executive producer Russell T Davies
to appear in the 2006 story School
Reunion. With Sarah Jane's enduring popularity reaffirmed, it
was decided to spin the character off into her own series. The Sarah
Jane Adventures debuted on New Year's Day 2007 with a special
entitled Invasion Of The
Bane, before her first full season aired later that year. The
journey that seemed to have come to an end with The Hand Of Fear
was really just the beginning. In all, there were five seasons of The
Sarah Jane Adventures -- by turns charming, scaring, and delighting
a whole new generation of children -- before Sladen's death from cancer
on April 19th, 2011.